this is a wireless keyboard right that's what it says on the website and on the
box so then why does it have a wire hanging off of it oh for the battery you
say oh well that explains it no that explains nothing it not only fails to
eliminate a wire from my desk it costs more and it needs to be unplugged
occasionally in order to keep the battery healthy calling this an
improvement over a wired keyboard is an outright lie the most baffling part is
that we live in a world that has Wireless power smartphones have had
wireless charging for so long that even devices made in North Korea support it
so what is preventing keyboard manufacturers from going true Wireless
well as it turns out nothing for the price of this tiny waffle maker we can
quickly and easily turn nearly any wireless keyboard into well and actually
wireless keyboard why hasn't this become a standard what are the pitfalls and how
can we avoid them and what are our different options to turn this keyboard
from a lie into a good honest peripheral the answer to all three is after this
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Wireless Power Solutions use electromagnetic induction which sounds
fancy but the principle is fairly simple a moving magnet near a coil of wire will
generate an electrical current in the aforementioned wire and conversely when
an electric current passes through a coil it generates a magnetic field so by
pulsing electricity through one coil you can create a pulsing or changing
magnetic field so that when a second coil is placed near it it will generate
an electrical current without a wire the double conversion means that
wireless charging is not particularly efficient which limits your total power
and compared to what you might see in the comic books magnetic force is only
effective over relatively short distances but the good news is that the
keyboard Community hasn't taken the NVIDIA approach to product design
yet and with only a few exceptions people keep their keyboards planted
fairly firmly on their desks desks that can be equipped with wireless power
modules of course we need a way to receive said Wireless power enter this
it cost us less than 15 bucks on Amazon and if we had the patience devices like
it actually this seems to be the exact same one can be had for as little as two
US Dollars on AliExpress it's a 5 watt
receiver that is plenty for our keyboard and inside it will find an oblong coil a
graphite pad to reflect the magnetic field back for a strong connection and a
small circuit board this one is primarily marketed for old smartphones
or those with broken QI charging systems but in practice it works to charge any 5
volt type c device up to one amp other similar coils can do 2 amps or 10 watts
and cost just a few dollars more and the upcoming G2 standard claims 15 watts
will be the new maximum I'm ready for toaster keyboard uh sort of while this
all in one sealed up solution is simple
it does present some challenges what if your keyboard's charging port is in a
place that makes it impractical to slide this underneath it what if your cable
plugs in right above or beside the feet and you like typing at an angle or what
if you just hate having a thin black white look what if you just hate having
a thin black wire running down the side of your otherwise Sleek perfect
mechanical input device thankfully there's no need to settle when you can
meddle with a few simple solder joints you can attach there it is one of these
directly to the USB port while hiding
the entire solution neatly inside the case for your keyboard it's the same
Electronics as that external one but without the type C connector the thin
plastic casing and oh did I mention that they are even cheaper getting a keyboard
open usually involves removing some or
should be leaving these
once all the screws are out opening the board should be as simple as popping the
clips
cool old spoiler movie Magic once you've got
the board open it should reveal a small circuit board that the USB port attaches
to and if you're really lucky at this stage you'll find test pads that are
clearly labeled usually something like VCC v-bus or V plus and that would be
for the positive connection sometimes though you'll be left guessing if you
have to guess a multimeter and a type c to USB 2.0 type a cable that you don't
use anymore will make quick work of things simply violently decapitate the
type A end of the cable plug it in prod the positive pin and then use your other
probe to poke at the test pads until you get that sweet sweet beep of continuity
now at this stage deciding where to place the charging coil is going to be
very dependent on your keyboard and on your personal preferences but one thing
that you will need to keep in mind when weighing placement options is that you
want the distance between your transmitter coil wherever that will be
and your receiver coil which will be inside your keyboard to be as short as
possible if you're planning to charge your keyboard wirelessly while you use
it which I would strongly recommend because it's awesome it means you never
have to think about it again the safest place to put this would be down near the
space bar even with the feet of the keyboard up the wrist area is going to
be designed to be as close to the desk as possible once you've got your coils
new home picked out and your solder points mapped you just use some Captain
tape to stick it down and solder it all together you may have to change the wire
out by the way out of the box it's not very long but fun Tech tip if you don't
have any spools of wire kicking around because you don't do this very often you
can always Harvest some wire from that USB cable that you just ruined or from a
Cat5e cable that's lying around with broken Clips or something like that then
it should be as simple as putting it all back together and you should have
yourself a truly wireless keyboard Let's
test drive it right now I just need a way to get power
to it ah yes this thing very cool uh how does it oh my God I
have to screw it into the bottom of the table
yep that's correct
okay well
rock on brother oh hey hey whoa what's
that it's a doing or something
I was about to say that I think maybe this wood or whatever just doesn't
something anyway the point is my phone charges so that's not the problem let's
take the keyboard back again
oh it's working now I just can't move this hand or this keyboard at all you
know what is the keyboard just charged
that would explain why it pulses for a
second and then it's like nope because
it's charged
but the next stage is to see if it will work through our Northern Lights desk
pad I'll see you ready
come on
do the trick don't be cool
we're so grounded we've got it
it's working okay we can confirm by restarting it and should pulse
I swear to God this is the right spot it doesn't matter The Savvy among you have
probably noticed by now that our solution requires the keyboard to be
placed pretty precisely for power and
some keyboards use a metal chassis so QI charging wouldn't be an option for those
at all that's what they want you to think there is a keyboard with wireless
charging built in you can put it pretty much wherever you want on the
accompanying desk mat and it's made of metal the angry Mouse cyberboard is
built like a 1960s refrigerator but wait if we look at the bottom what's this A
Plexiglas window with the charging coil in it crazy right but so is the price I
mean it's a really cool solution the pad uses 15 coils to improve placement
flexibility but by the times you've got the matching set keyboard and Pad you'll
have spent nearly 1100 US Dollars and
that's if you can even get your hands on them so that's not a real solution and
even if they used a lower cost implementation like ours the power
delivery side of things is going to turn off a lot of people the range of our
qlabs uts-1 which is designed to go
under the desk rather than only through a tiny thin pad is up to one inch
allowing it to comfortably penetrate most desktops but as you guys already
saw it can still be a little bit finicky for placement
um I mean with the phone it's a little bit better I'm able to line it up pretty
well and it's still expensive it costs 150 US
dollars this demo was supposed to show how it's easier to line up with the phone hello
buddy but in spite of these costs and design challenges we still don't think
there's any excuse I mean we already showed that it costs about two dollars
to add the power receiving side to a keyboard like the MX mechanical mini so
that shouldn't increase the price by something like this by more than a couple percent and while this might be a
little janky even by our standards we built a proof of concept charging pad
that shouldn't cost more than a hundred bucks at retail we just taped oh there
it is nine charging coils onto a piece of cardboard and then if you watch we
just uh put it under one of our stylish
Northern Lights desk pads hey and the point is this proof of
concept works I'm great but it works bottom line then
angry meow makes high quality products but we shouldn't have to rely on a
premium Niche brand to develop a feature that has been standard in other tech for
upwards of a decade what is it Logitech what are you afraid of Razer I mean heck
even Apple should have been on top of this by now legitimately at least this
is a real question like if you guys know why no one has done this please let us
know in the comments below if you go ahead and use the DIY option to add
wireless charging to your keyboard hey let us know how it went in the LTT form
thread that's Linked In the description perhaps we could use that thread as a
bit of a repository for others who are seeking out a truly Wireless life one
idea that I've actually been toying with for a while is embedding the wireless
charger in the tabletop surface so that I don't have to deal with one of these
high power through the desk ones and
then taking my Logitech power play mat and then embedding that like routing out
the shape of it and embedding that in the surface and then just laying a desk
mat over the entire thing how stealthy would that be
stealthy like the same way to response
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if you guys like this video maybe check out the time that we used y charge to
power a toy train it really did seem like Wireless power throughout the room
was just over the horizon but as far as we can tell they haven't really gone
anywhere since then